Introduction
*The growing antipathy toward conventional Washington politics, manifesting itself in the populist Tea Party movement, and translating into a Republican gain of congressional seats in the 2010 midterms, foreshadowed the events of January 6, 2021. A number of those legislators, who benefited from the populism sweeping the nation little more than a decade prior, were potential victims of the mob storming the Capitol.
*While the Trump era represents its nadir, the Republican Party’s transformation to “The Party Of Trump” has been simmering for decades over a boiling cauldron of irreconcilable GOP versions of conservatism.
*Trump’s excoriation of Vice President Mike Pence, for failing to preempt Biden’s certification, gave witness to his demand for unmitigated loyalty, even if such obeisance called for committing collusion. In an interview with the author, the former president downplayed the rioters’ verbal threats to Pence by dismissing them as mere hyperbole.
Chapter 1
*Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate in 2008, is a prototypical link bridging the transition from the populist Tea Party to the populism of the Trump era. Her 2006 victory in the Alaska governor’s race served to propel her into the national spotlight as a rising star, lavishly promoted by conservative media. Despite Palin’s skimpy resume, McCain took a calculated risk by naming her as second on the ticket, rather than going with his original inclination to pick veteran congressman, Joe Lieberman, a move that would have ineluctably incensed the GOP’s conservative element. Logic dictated that Palin would balance the ticket by appealing to a new breed of young Republicans comprising the anti-establishment wing of the party.
*As her popularity exploded among the masses of the GOP electorate, Palin’s demand for greater autonomy in message was initially met by resistance from McCain’s advisors. However, on the campaign trail, she was given increasingly wide latitude to slander Obama, questioning his patriotism while alleging a tie to terrorists. While the vitriol was off-putting to those in the GOP who were inclined to more civil discourse, it served to inflame the passions of those mesmerized by Palin’s delivery. Abetted by Fox News and like purveyors of disinformation, Palin’s attacks against Obama took on a life of their own. Her divisive rhetoric effectively tapped into the disaffection of a growing number of aggrieved whites who felt abandoned by the Republican establishment.
Chapter 2
* Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, right wing media personalities and fierce critics of the Obama Administration, became the faces of the Republican Party in the eyes of the populist movement.
*The Tea Party movement mounted widespread protests against big government, and railed against government programs in general. Economically, Tea Partiers claimed betrayal by the Republican establishment.
*Social conservatives coalesced to denounce GOP moderates, targeting those who supported abortion rights and gay marriage. Organized coalitions, effused with religious zeal, were willing to unseat seasoned incumbents with questionable primary candidates, even at the risk of falling to a democrat in the general election. A clear message was being sent to the Republican establishment; the ideological needle was moving precipitously to the right.
*The Obama presidency served to hasten the transformation of the Republican Party, the GOP articulating a more radicalized conservative voice, while effectively muting the dwindling moderates in the process. Discourse and compromise, so essential when considering bipartisan legislation, yielded to recalcitrance and dogma.
Chapter 3
*In a 2010 preview of his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump, exploiting his celebrity via a sympathetic conservative news cycle, amplified his megaphone condemning Cordoba, a controversial Muslim community center development near Ground Zero. It was during this period that Steve Bannon, Trump’s presidential chief strategist, was introduced to the future Commander In Chief. In a calculated measure to foment fear, the construction site was billed as the future home of a mosque. Anti Muslim sentiment gained momentum, perpetuated by nationwide protests featuring the Tea Party movement. Andrew Breitbart, owing to egregious violations of journalistic ethics and standards, capitalized on the zenophobic misinformation disseminated on his website. Trump, gauging the anti-Cordoba momentum, launched a personal vendetta against the project, thereby ingratiating himself to the aggrieved populist masses.
Chapter 4
*Those in the Republican establishment, such as Roger Ailes, sought to exploit the energy of the Tea Party movement to their advantage. Ailes translated his political savvy, honed by years of advising successful political campaigns, into the running of a conservative cable network empire. He personally challenged Barack Obama’s citizenship and patriotism. Glen Beck, of Fox News, was blatantly vitriolic in his tirades against Obama and his Administration. Beck’s populist appeal and encouragement, inspired neophyte, politically unqualified candidates, to run and ultimately be elected to Congress during the 2010 midterms. The Republican rout was clearly draped in an anti establishment message.
Chapter 5
*By general consensus, the 2012 Republican primary was shaping up to be a contest between the maverick, Sarah Palin, and the insider, Mitt Romney. Adding a new dimension to the 2012 race, Donald Trump, in teasing a run for the presidency, was perhaps testing the waters for a possible 2016 nomination. The healthcare albatross around Romney’s neck left him vulnerable to attack. The stigma of elitist followed him throughout the campaign and served to alienate him from working class Republicans. His lack of a killer instinct fed into the impression that he was a weak candidate. Albeit, with Palin and Trump declining to enter the race, Romney essentially backed into the nomination. Ultimately, Obama was elected by a comfortable margin to a second term, while Donald Trump immediately started laying the groundwork for 2016.
Chapter 6
*The GOP post mortem to the 2012 defeat in the presidential election highlighted a party out of touch with the trending populist voter. The message articulated by Mitt Romney, viewed as the quintessential establishment conservative, failed to resonate with a shifting voter demographic. The perception among a growing number of middle class Americans held that, unlike the “Party of Reagan”, the present day GOP, in abandoning them, had become a party of elites. There existed a pervasive feeling that the Party was completely out of touch with their day to day struggles. Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk, exploited populist disaffection by vilifying immigration reform as an impending threat to Middle America.
Chapter 7
*Pat Buchanan, running a nativist campaign in the 1992 Republican Presidential Primary, appealed to the nationalist sentiments informing a noticeable wave of populism sweeping across America. Trailing in the polls by a wide margin to George H.W. Bush, he lambasted the incumbent for failure to secure the border. Following the Bush nomination, Buchanan lobbied for and was granted a prime time slot at the convention, delivering a broadside from which the nominee’s campaign never recovered, with Bush ultimately losing to Clinton in the general election. Integration reform continued to be a GOP internecine bone of contention leading into the 2014 midterm primaries, with the anti-immigration faction prevailing. Stephen Miller, a minor GOP operative in 2014, played a key role in switching the narrative from legal to economic by portraying immigration as a threat to American jobs.
Chapter 8
*While speaking to an anti-immigration audience at the 2014 New Hampshire Freedom Summit, characteristically veering off script, Donald Trump received a rousing ovation when he boasted of building a secure border fence. By 2015, with the mainstream media failing to take him seriously, Trump was gaining momentum with the radical right. His narcissistic demeanor, style over substance, and crude vernacular notwithstanding, Trump’s populist message resonated with anti-establishment Republicans, witnessed by his steady bump in the polls. He demonstrated an uncanny ability to exploit his target audience’s distrust of the party machine by playing the role of victim, while portraying the RNC establishment as victimizers potentially spinning the nomination to a more conventional candidate. His message was well received by traditionally Democratic leaning unions when he drew a correlation between immigration and job loss for the American worker.
Chapter 9
*During the initial stages of his Republican Primary campaign, Donald Trump was anathema to the politically connected social conservatives, particularly among anti-abortion activists, due to his documented record as a pro-choice advocate. Yet, inexplicably and defying convention, Trump, in the midst of his obscenities, base behavior, and reprehensible personal and professional background, was enthusiastically embraced by the evangelical flock of believers.
*The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, coupled with the GOP’s refusal to consider a replacement on Obama’s watch, set the stage for Trump to appoint a conservative nominee in 2016. Landing the endorsements from high profile conservatives, such as Phyllis Schafley, was conditional on his commitment to that end. The litmus test for the eventual nominee would be the willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. Trump provided his list of prospective candidates, each of which fulfilled this requirement.
Chapter 10
*By all accounts, Jeb Bush had the name recognition, funding apparatus, critical endorsements, and credibility to capture the 2016 Republican nomination in the uncharacteristically crowded field of candidates. However, the GOP electorate was enamored with a candidate possessing a disparate set of credentials; celebrity versus character, a voiceferous bravado versus a measured tone, nationalistic and xenophobic versus welcoming and multicultural, an inciter in the mold of a Donald Trump. Bush was unjustly tarred as a Washington insider, irrespective of the fact that the totality of his political tenure had been spent at the state, versus federal, level. He seemed to inherit the baggage, both real and imagined, that his father and brother had left behind upon their respective exits from the White House. To Bush’s credit, he steadfastly refused to sacrifice his principles at the altar of convenience for the sake of arresting his race’s downward spiral in the polls.
Chapter 11
*Donald Trump and his campaign lowered the bar on negative campaigning against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. He countered media coverage of his own sexual improprieties by relentlessly promoting conspiracy theories involving Bill Clinton’s sexual exploits and disparaging Hillary as a ruthless persecutor of his purported victims. For maximum exposure, Trump’s advisers paraded the former president’s accusers live, in full view of a national television audience, during a presidential debate.
*The nadir of the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories was the infamously surreal Pizzagate scandal, which implicated the Clintons in a child sex ring, the illusion fabricated by Hillary’s apocryphally decoded, hacked emails.
Chapter 12
*There was a collective gasp among evangelical Christians when the Access Hollywood tape broke; however, their ultimate support for Trump was largely predicated on the rationale that he was the lesser of two evils. Their allegiance would be rewarded, with one of their own, running mate Mike Pence, spearheading the President elect’s transition team, and ensuring that fellow evangelicals were well represented in the newly minted Trump Administration.
*Inexplicably, on election night, Trump’s victory speech was uncharacteristically conciliatory, considerably more measured in tone than his standard campaign diatribes, and noticeably more inclusive. Albeit, the moment would prove to be an empty gesture, as the President’s inaugural address rather appealed to his evangelical social conservative base, whose leadership would enjoy unprecedented access to the White House and an open line of communication with an obliging President.
Chapter 13
*In November 2017, responding to allegations from four women to the Washington Post that, while they were teenagers, during his tenure as assistant DA, Alabama Republican senatorial candidate, Judge Roy Moore, had sexually molested them, conservatives claimed that the accused victimizer was the victim of a left wing conspiracy. Despite Moore being an overwhelming favorite among Trump supporters, the President reluctantly relented to pressure from the establishment wing of the senate, grudgingly endorsing the palatable kGOP incumbent, Luther Strange. Yet, at a pivotal televised campaign rally, where Strange assured the Alabama electorate that he was Trump’s candidate, the President, after his customary playing to the crowd, gave at best a lackluster nod to Strange, opening the door for a convincing primary win for Roy Moore. Steve Bannon, taking up the drumbeat for Moore, barnstorming for the controversial candidate during the general election campaign cycle, in a pitch particularly directed to evangelicals, vented that the opposition was out to destroy not only Moore, but by extension them. In the final analysis, the Bannon fed momentum failed to carry Moore across the finish line, as he lost to Democrat Doug Jones by the narrowest of margins. The nomination and ultimate confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court proved to be the timely antidote to the Roy Moore fiasco, rejuvenating a sagging Trump presidency among the power brokers of the Republican Party.
Chapter 14
*During Donald Trump’s tenure as president, the autonomy and independence of GOP legislators to legislate, as well as the legislative body’s traditional prerogative to place checks on the executive branch, became casualties to an overreaching autocrat, who was quick to declare anathema those having the temerity to deviate from the Trump dictated party line. There were a few Republicans in Congress who possessed both the mettle and willingness to jeopardize their political careers for the sake of standing on the side of truth; yet, there were a far greater number who were all too willing to forsake conscience for political expediency. However, lost in the vociferousness of the perceived Trump juggernaut was the underestimated scores of Republican voters, both moderates and conservatives, who felt the transformed party had abandoned them, culminating with the Democrats gaining the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections.
*Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity were at the forefront of ultra conservative media celebrities who perpetually hammered home the theme, to a mesmerized and gullible viewership, that Donald Trump was the victim of a vast left wing conspiracy. Trump engagingly fueled and reinforced this image of a maligned president via his twitter account. But, perhaps most disconcerting was his uncanny ability, during rallies and personal appearances, to incite a rabid mob of followers to the brink of violence.
Chapter 15
*Beginning with its outbreak in China, encompassing America’s first recorded death in late February of 2020, and continuing throughout his presidency, Donald Trump’s cavalier dismissiveness of the COVID-19 pandemic effectively sabotaged the efforts of the scientific and medical communities to contain the virus.
*The May 25, 2020 execution style death of George Floyd, while pricking the nation’s conscience, manifesting in a demand for police reform and accountability, rather than evoking a semblance of empathy from our nominal leader, elicited a rant from Donald Trump on the liberal media and “Black Lives Matter” movement.
*Failure of the Trump Administration to adequately respond to the pandemic and “Black Lives Matter” crises emboldened the “Never Trumpers” and began to register in the declining poll numbers of Trump endorsed candidates. As for Trump, his insatiable passion for dominating the news cycle was becoming counterproductive with an electorate waking up to a daily dose of dismal news feeds. His bloated ego would not allow him to accept the inevitable, that his grip on a 2020 reelection campaign was slipping away. Though he felt betrayed when his traditional ally, Fox News, was the first major network to call the election for Joe Biden, it became all too apparent that concession was never an option for Trump. Rather than focusing on a smooth transition of power, he escalated the “stolen election” rhetoric, agitating his angry legions of followers in the process, some of whom would show no limits in doing his bidding to overturn what they considered a rigged election. The events of January 6, 2021 reveal just how painfully close they came to succeeding.
Afterword
*Republican condemnation within Congress of Trump’s role in inciting the January 6th riot at the Capitol was short lived, with the exception of a sprinkling, whose sense of probity transcended unqualified partisan loyalty. While Representative Liz Cheney was ostracized by the GOP for her denouncement of the former president, Senator Ted Cruz, a Trump apologist, downplayed the magnitude of the insurrection on the pretext that the rioters were exercising their First Amendment rights. The GOP House leader, Kevin McCarthy, initially remonstrating on the floor against Trump for his involvement, ultimately withdrew his call for censure, obviously yielding to a fear of future repercussions. As he contemplates another run in 2024, Donald Trump continues to be the singular face of the Republican Party.
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Meticulous, deeply sourced reporting, insightful, non-obvious analysis. Must read.
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2022
Early contender for most important book of 2022. Few reporters are better sourced inside the conservative movement than Jeremey Peters. Trenchant, insightful reporting; nuanced, thoughtful analysis. This is a landmark study of the recent evolution of the Republican Party and the activists that drove the change, which will be remembered for years to come.
Reviewed in the United States on February 8, 2022
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